Hey everyone! I'm dealing with some real headaches regarding Copilot in Office applications. We've got M365 E5 licenses and are using Copilot, but it seems like there's a serious inconsistency when it comes to disabling it on individual apps like PowerPoint, Word, and Excel. According to a Microsoft article, we should be able to turn it off for specific applications, especially since our leadership has expressed concerns about it getting in the way of productivity. However, we can't seem to find those options, even though we're running the Monthly Enterprise Channel, Build 19029.20244. Has anyone else faced this issue? It's frustrating when users ask how to disable Copilot, and I have to point them to that article, but then they think we're not doing it right. Any help would be appreciated!
2 Answers
If you're looking for another way around this, you might try using Group Policy or Intune to disable the Copilot menu buttons themselves. This might be complicated since Microsoft hasn’t published the control IDs for the Copilot buttons. You can check out this GitHub repo for control IDs to see if there's a workaround: https://github.com/OfficeDev/office-fluent-ui-command-identifiers/issues/24.
It sounds like you might be mixing up personal and enterprise subscriptions. The article you linked actually applies to personal accounts, which is probably why you can’t find those options in the enterprise settings. Unfortunately, you can't disable Copilot in individual Office apps under the enterprise license.
Is there an official Microsoft support document that confirms this? I totally get your point, but having an official reference would be super helpful for explaining it to others.